My Life as Told by Others
by Spirit the Fire Dragon
Summary: I apologize for any confusion due to the title, but my life was boring-it's my afterlife that you'll be interested in. In few words, my afterlife consists of haunting my old home and watching the new residents as they live and lie and sometimes die.
1. Chapter 1

If you're here, then you're probably interested in my life.

My life was boring. You're not going to find much here about my life. If you do in fact want to hear about my life, then read this next paragraph with avid attention and then leave.

My name is John Hamish Watson. I was born and raised in Hampshire in 1900. My sister, Harriet, was a drunk since she was fifteen, a shame to the Watson name. I went to university to become a doctor but was shipped out to the French lines in the First World War where I was promptly shot and I returned home to London as a broken man. I lived on an army pension for two years before I got myself a job as a writer for the _Times_ and moved to a tiny flat in central London. I got married three times and had a stillborn girl with Mary, my first. I was sixty three when I died.

Now, if you're still here, then you're wondering what could be so interesting now that I've lived and died. The simple fact is that the other people I met after I died are much more interesting that I. You see, I lived in 221B Baker Street with my third wife and died there of a heart attack. I never really left, because I woke up the following morning and went down to rest by the window when I realized my body hadn't followed me. My wife moved out two days later but I couldn't leave my flat to follow her.

I sat by my window as a very lonely ghost more often than not and watched the days and years pass. I watched the world revolutionize and I watched my new, unaware flatmates as they came and went and cried and died. I remember them all; over nearly fifty years as I sat and watched them live.

Each of my tenants was special and personal to me. I honestly wish I had known them in my lifetime so I could have spoken to them and known them as people. But I am a ghost and I cannot speak to them. I can only watch them live.

To tell you the rest of my story, I have to tell you theirs. My life as a ghost continues and runs along the lives of the living flatmates who took 221B as theirs and conducted their lives from the room where I sat with my lovely wife every morning before I died. I learned as they did and watched their mistakes ruin their lives or make them.

My first unaware flatmate was a man called Gregory Lestrade. He was an interesting and a private man. I always feel sadness whenever I think of his time spent in 221B.

* * *

**Really short prologue. Expect more soon—hopefully. Please leave a review if you'd like and I'll see you next chapter when Inspector Gregory Lestrade and family moves into 221B to not really meet the resident ghost, John Watson.**

**-Spirit-**


	2. Chapter 2

As I mentioned previously, Gregory Lestrade and family moved into my flat—and they did so nearly immediately after I died. Gregory himself was a shorter man, with thick greying hair and hard lines around his mouth and eyes—the weary eyes of a man who was looking for redemption…perhaps in his family, or maybe his work?

Nevertheless, Gregory had a beautiful wife named Eloise and two daughters, Abigail and Evelyn. Abigail was the eldest at four, and Evelyn was only two, but she was already showing the fair hair of her mother and the pale eyes of her father. I found myself immediately taking to the girls, Evelyn in particular. She reminded me of the daughter I could have raised if she hadn't died in childbed along with my wife, Mary.

When the family first moved in, I kept to myself, usually by the window in the top bedroom. I was in the middle of my after-life crisis; I didn't know what being a ghost meant or how to control my visibility—or even if I _was_ visible. It was extraordinarily difficult to stay in one place, because even if I had the tiniest thought of being somewhere else within the flat—say, a passing thought about the kitchen cabinets, for example, like I learned the second week after my death—I would find myself there the moment the thought developed.

Many times I would be sitting protectively by the window and then suddenly find myself in the Lestrade's bedroom, sometimes in the midst of a savage, whispered fight or other nightly acts that would have made my lively cheeks blush. Other times I would be stuck between floors, or in the kitchen cabinets and once the fireplace—I had little time to observe the Lestrades go about their business in my home during the initial time after my death. I was preoccupied, you could say.

It took me quite some months to acquire the ability to stay in one place and not randomly jump across the flat at the thought of it, and several years to master the ability. In the time, I caught snippets of the Lestrade's lives—Abigail's enrollment into her nursery school, Gregory's promotion to Detective Inspector, the passing of Eloise's mother and the subsequent loss of her third child—but I was not in touch with the minor workings of their everyday routines.

I began to take notice of the new residents (though they were hardly new, they've been living in my flat for nearly two years at this point) when my own anger and grief had passed; when I resigned myself to a long existence in the tiny flat. I had much time to build an opinion of the family, of each member.

To me, Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade seemed sad and resigned, but he was rather good at smothering the feeling with work and outings with his girls. He was stressed beyond belief, the lines around his eyes deepening and the shadows under his eyes becoming permanent as the months passed. He was kind, loyal and handled drink rather not well—more often than not, I'd be pulled from a reverie from where I sat near the living room window from a stumbling and drunk Gregory coming home at an ungodly hour. He would forgo his bed and sleep the drink away on the sofa, leaving me to keep vigil beside him and wish I could drape a blanket over his thinning frame.

His wife irritated me. Not at first, however, and rarely does irritation of anyone excel past that, but Eloise Lestrade was not an easy woman to live with, whether she could see you or not. Her moods were fickle at the best of times, positively beastly at worst, while her strange compulsions to clean or lock a single door countless times over tried her family's patience. The woman could be strangely buoyant one moment, and then fall into the blackest of moods within the hour from the simplest of things. I applauded her husband for so calmly and stoically taking the cold insults and blubbering apologies and the occasional screeched profanities with godly patience.

The daughters were ordinary but not without personality; Abigail was sweet and introverted, looking very much the copy of her mother, preferring to play with her father's pen or typewriter over the kids in the street. Her sister, Evelyn, was much the same, but she only resembled her mother with her fair hair and blue eyes. She had the patience and commonsense of her father. She was attached to Abigail at the hip and the two were rarely seen apart; from what I gathered, Abigail was protective of her sister while Evelyn worshipped the other girl, like many young siblings to their older.

All in all, the Lestrades were an interesting family to watch. Though the fits Eloise threw were hideous, and the drunken encounters of Gregory's were pitiful, in true British fashion they squared their shoulders for the outside world and for the girls, continuing on like a commonplace family on a homely street.

* * *

The pattern rarely shifted from that—for me, at least. I was left alone because they could not see me, and I could watch them live and cry and fall ill on the sofa, wondering if I would have been the kind of man to have gone to the pub with Gregory, or the kind to have stopped him from going home drunk to his wife and children. But I was pulled from this routine on the eve of Evelyn's fifth birthday; the girl woke late in the night.

I was sitting by her window, not for the sake of watching little girls sleep, but because I had a fantastic view of the snow falling from the dark sky. But in my defense, it was my room first.

I heard a tiny, open mouthed yawn from behind me, a sleepy sound from the back of a young throat, then a whisper of a tiny voice that settled in the space between me and the sleepy nearly five year old.

"Mister?"

I turned at the sound and saw two droopy eyes directed at me, barely held open from the weight of her exhaustion. I looked down at my hands, at the military fatigues I wore (I found them somehow more comforting than the dressing gown I had died in, after all, I had survived the Great War) and looked back at the tired girl. Whatever the reason, her young eyes had deciphered me from the dark wallpaper, even while the pale blue orbs were clogged and distorted with sleep. I smiled reassuringly at her, and said, "It's only a dream, Evie."

The girl yawned cutely before she asked, "Are you a soldier?"

"Yes. I fought in the Great War. I fought for you, little Evelyn."

She made a small sound, but her eyes were drifting shut. "Can you tell me a story, Mister Soldier man?"

I cocked my head at the request, and eventually said, "Yes." I told her the story my mother told me when I woke from a dreadful nightmare, a comforting, short tale about a mocking jay and a lost fox pup.

The girl was asleep within seconds, leaving me alone but with a smile and the ending of a story on my lips.

* * *

Evelyn Lestrade never saw me again. I found I didn't mind.

Evelyn brought up the dream to her sister when Abigail woke. The older sister mentioned that she had once thought she saw a man sitting by their window when she had been younger and half-asleep, but hadn't given the appearance of the sad-looking man a second thought when she woke in the morning. Evelyn didn't bring it up again.

* * *

I remember a particular instance when Gregory came stumbling home after a long day of work and an even longer night of drinking. He smelt of tobacco and whiskey, with the harsh twang of cheap perfume—a pub, no doubt, the one he favored after the particularly hard days in his crime investigation work.

Like I mentioned before, Gregory Lestrade does not handle drink well. He managed the buttons on his overcoat well enough, but couldn't coordinate his fingers to untie the laces of his boots. He flopped onto the couch with them on, already half unconscious. I willed myself next to him and found myself looking down on the man, seeing the drool and the flicking eyes underneath his sunken eyelids. Gregory looked far too thin and far too tired—his skin was waxy and unshaven on his chin, with the bones of his fingers and hands more pronounced than I thought healthy.

My hand drifted down on its own accord and made the motion as to comb my fingers through his grey hair, but the glassy, opal white fog that made me swirled and disintegrated at the touch of the living man. I sighed and looked woefully towards the blanket on the armchair near the sofa—I wanted nothing more than to take it and drape it over the man's shivering form.

I closed my eyes and forced myself to concentrate on the blanket that was so very heavy to me. With intense concentration and will that may have taken me hours into the night to muster, I managed to force the blanket to fly over and settle precariously and rather messily over his shoulders and back. I smiled to myself and settled down near him, in the armchair, to maintain a vigil over his sleeping form.

"Sleep well, Gregory," I said. The man snorted in his sleep and rolled away from me.

* * *

Gregory never found out who put the blanket over him, seeing as his daughters denied waking up that night, and his wife having been staying at her sister's for the weekend. He seemed to contemplate it for a while before shrugging it off and assuming that in his drunken stupor he had pulled it over himself.

* * *

I smiled sadly and turned back to my window.

Several more years passed. Evelyn enrolled in school, excelling in the arts and blossoming from the shy little girl to a pure performer. Abigail began to show interest in children and I had a feeling she would become a teacher or something of the sort when she grew older. Eloise became as fickle and outrageous as ever, but Gregory showed astounding patience in his dealings and pleas when he rebuked her threats to leave.

Seven years—seven years I had to watch them grow as a family; I watched it grow and grow and eventually tear itself apart.

Eloise had been especially unusual the past few months. She often left not a half hour after her husband, returning before the girls did but with a strange look about her. At first, I put off the strange scent as another of Eloise's eccentricities. But as the months passed and the outings became more frequent and longer, I began to wonder. She returned with assorted garments missing, sometimes torn or smudged, while her excuses for absences the girls or husband noticed became flimsier and feeble, even to me and especially to _Inspector_ Gregory Lestrade.

By now, I had identified the underlying, darting feeling in the Lestrade household, and I sensed that the fragile peace was spiraling down and down; its only destination was total destruction. The timetable was unsure, but I knew when Eloise returned from one of the strange meetings nearly an hour early and with a smartly dressed man in tow that the time for destruction had come.

I watched from the living window—with something close to horror—as Eloise pulled the man into their bedroom and closed the door rather firmly behind them. I knew that Evelyn was upstairs, home sick from her school with a nasty flu, and her mother was down in her bed with another man…

Eloise had timed her in-home betrayal rather badly. Gregory came home early, due to nervousness and worry for his youngest. Allow me to mention he was not a Detective Inspector for nothing. He was sooner to spot her disloyalty as he was the spark of malice in a murderer's eyes. I watched with sadness, with heavy resignation, as Gregory halted in the doorway, turned toward their bedroom with a dark brow and set jaw and marched there with a firm step.

I couldn't make myself appear at Gregory's side to witness what he did, not then. Instead, I turned to the window and listened for the female shrieks and deep startled sounds from her smartly-maybe-not-so-dressed-companion. My shoulders felt heavier when I heard Gregory's cold announcement that he and the girls were leaving. He marched up to collect his sick girl, packed her things before leaving my flat.

He returned that weekend for his things. Eloise threw herself at his feet and begged for forgiveness, but the scent of cheap cologne in her hair disgusted Gregory and he told her, calmly, that he was ending the marriage of ten years and moving permanently out with Abigail and Evelyn. I never did see the girls again; after that day, I never saw Gregory, either.

Eloise moved out a week later. Never once did I hear her name again.

I think about her, sometimes, and Gregory too—often the former with loathing and the latter with sadness and pity. The hardworking man didn't deserve such painful strife in his home. Often times, little Evelyn Lestrade occupies my mind—sometimes her face changes and shifts to look like my Mary, like me, to turn into the daughter I almost had. I imagine that she would look much like Evelyn. It hurts.

I don't know what ever happened to Abigail Lestrade or her father. I like to think that Abigail did become a teacher and married a kind man, and that Gregory became a well-respected senior officer in the force. Eloise I don't bother to wonder.

The flat was quickly occupied after the Lestrade's departure—by one Henry Knight. Henry, oh Henry, the lad was so young and so very tormented. Whenever I turn my mind to his very short time in 221B, I feel a dizzying sense of helplessness and stillborn fear. The poor soul—he was only a boy.

* * *

**Henry's up next! How do you think I did on the Lestrades? I love Lestrade, personally, and everyone kind of assumed (at least I did) that he was a widower, but having a cheating wife is nearly as bad or even worse in my opinion. **

**But I digress. Leave a review if you've the time, and thanks for reading! I love you all.**

** -Spirit-**


	3. Chapter 3

Henry Knight was a timid boy. He had a strangely shaped face and darting eyes, with nervous fingers and a jerking type of movement; he seemed to look over his shoulder at every turn and drank an obscene amount of assorted caffeinated drinks. Henry Knight was anything but knightly—he was the type of man to drop to his knees and beg for mercy before running to find an escape, not even considering to fight.

He moved into my flat two weeks after the Lestrades left, but stayed an infinitely shorter time. He had many belongings; so many that they filled the flat to the brim and overflowed into every sensible corner and surface, and I was shoved out of my sitting spaces by the windows (both of them, it was incredibly annoying) by the sheer amount of _things_ piling on the chairs and tables and the floor. The things were varied, from books to paints but were not restricted to such artistic confines—he had telescopes on the stairs and magazines piling in the kitchen, he had pictures on great pieces of canvas stacked in both bedrooms awaiting to be hung, and the mantel and fireplace were practically swathed in taped bits and pieces of patterned cloth taken from shirts or pants he brought home from erratic excursions.

When the things accumulated, after they filled every tiny space, I realized almost immediately that the things had absolutely no meaning to Henry. The things were there to fill the space, to fill the space in his life or mind that was entirely too empty for a man of twenty-two. I knew I should have been faced with a bright young man who was just on the precipice of his prime. And yet Henry was either holed up in his room or out on strange trips at dusk or afternoon, returning with arms full of even more things that were unpacked and placed somewhere to be forgotten.

After two short months of Henry's erratic and almost fearful companionship (if one could call it such), I had resorted to brushing off magazines or books that piled on the chair near the window or on the small ledge near the one in the top bedroom so I could sit and watch the world. It wasn't that I minded standing—after all, now my joints didn't hurt, and I couldn't feel gravity tugging at my muscles to pull me slowly to the Earth—but it was more habit than anything. Sitting felt no different than standing, and yet I would risk frightening the already skittish Henry by dusting off papers from chairs to sit.

I watched Henry more often than not now that my places were filled, watching him as he woke screaming from nightmares, howling about a hound of some sort. It made me wonder what had happened to him—had he been attacked by a dog as a lad? But Henry didn't write in a journal, nor did he speak to himself about it, so I was left in the dark. I found out by a mere passing mention from the woman downstairs that Henry went to therapy sessions every Monday and Thursday. Had the lad, in fact, been traumatized?

* * *

I had only one close brush with Henry in the short time he lived in my flat. Like Evelyn Lestrade before him (I still mourned the loss of her presence), it was during near-sleep. Henry had fallen asleep on the couch (somehow wedging himself between the assorted bags and boxes full of what I assumed were old newspapers) with his head tilted painfully towards the opposite wall while his body was splayed towards the cushions.

I was standing by the far window, watching the sleepy London street and the occasional lone wanderer or drunk stumble past. I heard Henry snort and make a few pained sounds, but I didn't look back at him—that was one thing I had only just gotten used to, not turning or reacting to the Living because what was the use? I could scream and they wouldn't hear—and instead looked up to the black sky rolled with grey clouds, searching for a pinprick light that was a star.

I heard another sound from the couch, one that made me turn. Henry was propped on one elbow, wiping his face, while his heavy lidded eyes found me in their haze of sleep. He was rubbing his eyes when he said, "Who's there?"

I stilled at the question. It was then I realized that hazy with sleep, the mind could somehow pierce the veil between the Illusion of Life and the Reality of Death and see the earthbound ghosts. Evelyn had; at first I had assumed that since she was young, her mind hadn't yet guarded itself completely against the Reality and had been able to see me while drowsy. Yet here was timid Henry Knight, squinting in the darkness, searching for a short man in military fatigues standing near his window.

"I said who's there?" He would have been much more intimidating if his voice hadn't wavered with fear. I saw him scrabble from the couch, eyes still crusty and mind sluggish, in an attempt to open the drawer on the crowded side table for his gun.

I stayed still, unsure whether or not to respond to the frightened man. If I did, would he shoot? What would I even say? How could I explain myself when after Henry woke completely, he wouldn't be able to hear my voice or see my silhouette? Instead I opted for silence, waiting for his mind to guard itself against the Reality. (The Reality is exactly what it seems; the Illusion is a mere safeguard against the harsh truth that many could not face while alive, while frightened.)

Henry blinked and looked around, approaching my window and stopping mere feet from me. His eyes slid right through me, as did his gun; my opal, foggy substance-body curling around the barrel like smoke, clutching to it like spidery tendrils before reforming to my general body shape. I searched his face, seeing the fear in his darting eyes and etched into the premature lines around his mouth, like Gregory. I felt such sadness for him then, a kind of helplessness floundering inside of my chest. If I had been alive, if I could have spoken to him, known him, maybe then he would not be so afraid. Maybe he would have someone to speak to besides a therapist, a friend that he obviously did not have now.

Henry lowered his gun and slowly went about the flat, flicking on every light until no corner of his brimming flat was left in the shadows. I stood by the window and tried to feel less fear.

* * *

Four months. An entire four months Henry Knight lived with me. The poor, frightened boy with a name like bravery but a timid heart and a hunted-animal mindset. That scared child—for that was what he really was, a child, not a man of twenty-two his body had led me to believe—who filled his flat with a staggering amount of _things_ and screamed of a hound. Henry Knight, the one who lived with me the shortest, but the one I remember the most often and the one who always makes me guilty. Guilty for dying, for not being there to stop him, to help him.

I was in the upstairs bedroom when I knew something was amiss. I willed myself downstairs and, if I had been alive, my heart would have stuttered for breath with the sight that met me.

Little Henry Knight was sitting on the couch between a box of dental tools he had brought home the week before and a wicker basket of fake fruit, scrawling on a yellow notepad with a red pen. Beside him, lying between an orange and an apple, was his gun, safety off and loaded.

"No," I said. Henry kept on writing, his hands shaking; his breath erratic.

"No!" I said again. Henry put the note on the table, on top of a pile of dusty records. I caught the phrases _My dad was not insane _and _there is always the hound in my dreams_ and finally _Dewer's Hollow is just too frightening. Forgive me, Dad, I'm so sorry but I'm not brave like you._

"No, Henry!" I watched in horror as that frightened boy picked the gun and hesitantly place it in his mouth, his eyes sliding shut—

"Stop!" Despite myself, despite my oath sworn in Gregory's time to not interfere in the Living's lives, I lunged forward as if I could yank that gun from his mouth and throw it amidst his things. My hand hit the precariously lying notebook with his suicide not scrawled in red ink. With the force of my emotions behind the motion, it was sent fluttering towards Henry and under the sofa.

Henry jerked and his eyes popped open. His body tensed; his fingers jerked. There was a single, short _bang. _It rang in my ears; blood splattered on the yellow wallpaper, onto the sofa and the dental equipment. Onto the fake fruit and the newspapers stacked near it.

I stood motionless, watching the red streaks form. The lady from downstairs came up, screamed. I think she might have fainted, too, but I'm not quite sure. She called for the police.

I watched the red ink write words on the wall.

* * *

An investigator came that day, looked over the scene. He thought aloud; he believed it was suicide but I knew he wished it was a murder. (If one could wish for such a thing.) The vast amount of people wandering in my flat was enough to drive me up and into the walls.

"Where's a note?" the investigator wondered aloud. I closed my eyes.

"There's too much stuff here, sir," one of the officers said.

"Could be anything," another added.

I looked up. I willed myself into the couch, before the notepad that held Henry's red inked words on the yellow paper. I looked at the investigators looking at Henry. I wanted them gone. I kicked the notepad.

The yellow thing went skidding from under the sofa, gently hitting the investigator's heel. He turned; looked down. He picked it up with a gloved hand and read it over.

"There's the note," he said.

"Where did it come from?" the officer asked.

"Maybe it was a draft," the other chimed in. "Or a pet."

I turned away from the wretched thing. I was upstairs before I knew I wanted to be there. I stood by the window there, unwilling to touch one of Henry's things. I watched the dusk fall and the shadows grow.

* * *

The lady downstairs, with the help from two of her sons, went to work clearing Henry's things from the flat after the investigation was completed. I didn't try to stop them though it hurt to watch his things go. I had begun to grow onto the things, the meaningless things that were so much mass and space but so little substance.

When the flat was empty of all furniture and of all things, the woman had her boys tear down the wallpaper and pull up the wood in the kitchen. She replaced the yellow paper with a black and white pattern, looking like spades in a deck of cards. The wood was replaced by tile in the kitchen and a soft, plush red carpet was laid over new hardwood floors in the living space. She refurnished the place with dark wooded tables and new kitchen appliances.

I mourned the loss of the crammed space. I missed Henry and his strange things.

It took a full three months for someone else to move into the new and refurbished flat. After the news about Henry's suicide had faded.

There were two men, unlike Gregory's family and Henry's bachelor life. The two men, to me, seemed more like business associates than friends or potential flatmates. One dark haired, the other blonde; the short one and the tall one; one a genius and the other not-so-much.

Their names were Jim Moriarty and Sebastian Moran.

* * *

**Sorry for the wait! Finals finished up and I finally have time to write now. Good times, yeah? Anyways, sorry for any typos or the like. Thanks to those who reviewed (thank **_**you**_**, I suppose) and I hope anyone whose reading is enjoying where this is going. Thanks again, and see you next time.**

**-Spirit-**


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